Great-grandfather surprised with world record after building largest brick collection
Great-grandfather Clem Reinkemeyer’s barn houses a very unusual collection.
The 87-year-old, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, has been collecting bricks for the last 40 years of his life, and each one tells its own story.
Clem’s 8,882 unique items have earned him the record for largest collection of bricks, something that came as quite a surprise to him.
It was while he was out of town that his daughter Celia and her husband Dan Bisett, who helped Clem build his special brick barn, gathered together a group of friends to count the bricks.
They’d secretly applied for the record and were able to surprise Clem with his very own Guinness World Records certificate.
“I got back in town and it was a big surprise, and I’m very happy to have this certificate,” he told us.
Clem, a retired mathematical engineer and real estate developer, has bricks from all around the United States, organized in his storage facility by state.
The bricks have come from the street, old commercial buildings and houses, and they all tell their own unique story.
Clem even has bricks with spelling mistakes carved into them – like a backwards ‘S’ on Tulsa – making them all the more special to his collection.
“Sometimes they are [more expensive than the correctly spelled ones],” he said. “I think Oklahoma has a history for the most misspelled bricks.”
“I don’t know why,” he added with a laugh.
Clem explained: “The break tide for making the bricks was about maybe 1870 to 1910.
“Every town had to have their own bricks because they needed them for fireplaces.
“A special kind of brick like this has a certain clay that withstands heat, and everybody needed a fireplace.”
One of his favourites in his collection is a sidewalk brick made by a manufacturer in Washington D.C. that used to be located where the Pentagon now stands.
“There may be some of these under the Pentagon,” he said. “But I think that this is one of a kind.”
Clem also has an international section in his collection, with bricks from Germany, Greece, Ireland and New Zealand among those lining his shelves.
Some of his bricks even date back thousands of years, such as a Roman brick he has from the year 100 AD.
“Collecting anything, it kind of gets away from you,” he quipped.
What appealed to me about bricks is, they have names and you can trace them back historically to places, and that always intrigued me.
“It’s unusual,” he laughed. “But I like it.”